A change in the weather: Modernist imagination, African American imaginary.
Item
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Title
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A change in the weather: Modernist imagination, African American imaginary.
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Identifier
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AAI3144160
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identifier
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3144160
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Creator
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Jacques, Geoffrey.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Meena Alexander
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Date
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2004
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Literature, American | Literature, English | Black Studies | Theater | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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This dissertation is an exploration of the impact of African American culture on modernist poetic language. It explores the work of Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, James Bland, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bert Williams, Samuel Beckett, and the genesis of ragtime and Tin Pan Alley-style song. The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter, "Haunted," is concerned with the idea of the uncanny as a function of language. Through an examination of "The Comedian as the Letter C" (1923) by Wallace Stevens, "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934) by Zora Neale Hurston, Tender Buttons (1914) by Gertrude Stein, and "The St. Louis Blues," by W. C. Handy (1914), this chapter shows how Freud's idea of the uncanny can be used to read in modernist texts an enactment of a specific type of anxiety which catalyzes the construction of modernist self-consciousness, which is partially a racialized self-consciousness. The second chapter, "Lyric," discusses the emergence of symbolist and early modernist lyric poetry in English in relation to the emergence of modern popular songs in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and suggests how this examination can illuminate the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, arguing that he is a little-examined, but important, precursor to modernism. The third chapter, "Minstrel," begins with a study of the relationship between performativity and lyric language in the art of Bert Williams, the early 20th century vaudeville comedian. The influence of minstrelsy on the work of Samuel Beckett is the subject of the concluding section of this chapter. The section studies two of Beckett's plays: Waiting for Godot (1953) and Not I (1972). Questions of canon formation and the aims of modernist criticism are explored in the fourth, and last chapter, "Vaudeville," and the implications of that discussion are drawn out through an examination of the modernism of Cane (1922). Cane, although it is a multi-genre, linguistically experimental text published by the same company as The Waste Land, is not commonly designated as an unqualified central text of modernism. This chapter (and this dissertation) inquires into why this state of affairs exists.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
